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Fanfare Magazine: 28:1 (09-10/ 2004)
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Alia Vox
AV9832
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Alfonso Ferrabosco (c. 1575–1628) was one of three composers to bear the same name, being known generally as Ferrabosco II to distinguish him from his father and son. Alia Vox’s rubric “Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger” is therefore ambiguously unsatisfactory. Alfonso’s father was born into a musical family in Bologna in 1543, but before the age of twenty he had followed in the footsteps of many of his countrymen by leaving Italy for employment at the Tudor court. There he established an extravagant reputation as one of the most outstanding and influential musicians at Elizabeth’s court, before fleeing England to return to Italy in 1578. Behind him, Ferrabosco left mayhem in the shape of murder and two illegitimate children, a girl and the subject of the present disc, Alfonso II the younger, probably born in Greenwich.
After spending much of his youth in the shadow during the declining years of Elizabeth’s reign, the younger Ferrabosco was eventually appointed as a Musician for the Viols in 1592. After the accession to the throne of James I, he taught Henry, Prince of Wales, and later his brother Charles, who became Prince of Wales after the premature death of Henry. When Charles came to the throne in 1625, Ferrabosco became a musician to the court, being named Composer to the King the next year following the death of John Coprario. His appointment may have come as mollification to the restless Ferrabosco, who—in the same year he was appointed—wrote an affidavit in which he announced plans to leave England for good. He died two years later, having finally achieved the court recognition he had long sought.
Ferrabosco’s importance to English Jacobean music was considerable, showing him to be both an innovator and an upholder of tradition. While his songs (the Ayres of 1609) are the first English works to show the influence of the new style of Italian continuo song, his viol consort music continued to develop the polyphonic style his father had done much to foster in his adopted country. The clear debt owed by son to father can be heard in a recent cpo release devoted to both played by the Rose Consort (at the time of writing not reviewed in Fanfare). Rather than juxtapose the two, Jordi Savall has chosen to concentrate solely on the son, although by coincidence the two discs do both open with the same pair of works, the exquisitely lovely five-part Dovehouse Pavan and Almain. In both, I prefer the sonority and the interpretations of the Rose Consort, whose cleaner, more refined sound not only exposes the counterpoint more tellingly, but whose slower tempo in the Pavan incorporates a greater sense of the build up and release of tension than Hesperion’s more generalized expressivity. Much the same goes for the other works the two discs share in common, two six-part Fantasias and the four-part Fantasia No. 14.
Ferrabosco was especially renowned for his fantasias, which exerted a strong influence on succeeding generations of English consort composers. Savall has concentrated on these masterfully wrought contrapuntal pieces, giving us no less than 12 of those in four parts, pieces particularly skilled in this respect. I have to confess that, for all their undoubted qualities, I do not find them particularly ingratiating listening. To my ears, there is a kind of restless aridity about much of this music, which, for me lacks that element of romantic intensity and drama found a little later in the fantasias of William Lawes. Perhaps I’m not sufficiently familiar with the music at present, or possibly Hesperion’s performances are just not persuasive enough. It would be interesting to hear what light Fretwork or Phantasm might throw on Ferrabosco II.
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